Facebook Cracking Down on Click-Bait

Facebook is cracking down on “click bait,” or articles people share on the social network with headlines to attract clicks, but little other information.

In a press release Monday, Facebook said it considers click bait “when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed,” the press release said.

Facebook said it could recognize articles that are click bait by calculating the amount of time users spend away from Facebook after clicking on an article.

“With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them,” Facebook said in the press release.

Facebook is constantly tweaking its “news feed algorithm,” which determines what users see in the feed. The algorithm is crucial to the social network’s business, because the longer people spend scrolling through posts, the more advertisements they may see.

A common complaint from Facebook users is that the news feed is filled with junk that they don’t want to read from news sites known for pumping out “listicles” featuring subjects like humorous cat videos or celebrity gossip.

Weeding out sub-par content from the news feed is a constant struggle for Facebook. In December, the social network announced a major overhaul of the news feed, based on survey data, that aimed to populate it with more “quality content.” Still, the click-bait persisted.

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